Twitter’s keyword targeting will do Google more favours than harm

Twitter unveiled its keyword-targeting capability for advertisers yesterday (April 17) amid an expected slew of product announcements in what representatives of the company describe as a “big step” in its targeting capabilities.

For instance, a soft drinks company could target all the users who had recently tweeted “I’m thirsty”, in addition to Twitter’s existing targeting tools.

If this sounds familiar to Google’s AdWords platform – which itself has went through a major overhaul recently – then you’d be right. I’ve previously aired my opinions that Facebook and Twitter pose more of a potential threat to Google’s towering dominance in the search market than the ‘search alliance’ pairing of Bing and Yahoo.

However, I’d also like to add one more stipulation. I think this competition from Twitter will be welcomed by Google, especially as it faces ongoing scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic over its practises in the search sector.

Google has reportedly recently proposed a host of concessions, including labelling its own products more clearly in its search results, to European regulators considering complaints that it gives its own properties undue prominence in its results.

While I hardly expect the introduction of Twitter’s keywords feature to massively erode the profitability of AdWords, I imagine it will aid Google’s cause in fending off criticism from the likes of Microsoft by further adding to market plurality.

In fact, I’d ask the question of how Twitter keywords targeting along with the likes of Facebook Graph Search, will effect the lowly marketshare of the aforementioned ‘search alliance’?

The Government’s anti-obesity drive, Change4Life, is back on the radar of marketers and the public, as it has been intermittently since it launched in January 2009. The approach to implementation of the strategy has changed more than once in the intervening period as successive political philosophies regarding government budgets balanced against corporate contribution, the voice of lobby groups (both brand and consumer) and learnings have come to the fore.

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The answer to that question could be ‘yes’, as mobile spend accounts for half of digital ad spend growth, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau’s digital adspend report conducted by PwC – but this shouldn’t be at the expense of using other channels.

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